#March2017

There’s a stunning, albeit welcomed, banality to my life. To skip two weeks of Desktop Thursdays, the column where I share with you both my virtual and tangible worlds, and look back and find emptiness. Placidity. Nothing much to report, over and out. Nothing much to comment upon, over and out.

I’m here this week, though, with said column. And I’ll share, with you said worlds.

There can be something exhilarating and freeing about a condemned, Post-Hope existence.

Sure. I utter this from a plateau. From a monument of privilege.

My wife makes good money, I got a dick, can pass for straight, and sport a blanche complexion.

With those caveats in tow, I mean, this rotting obelisk doesn’t seem so intimidating. It may be a survival technique, these gallantly leapt hoops I am gallantly leaping through. But what else would you ask of me?

The seas rise, the Earth heats, the resources dwindle, the population increases. Those in charge predicate power and greed over empathy and charity.

It’s done. It. Capital “I”, if you will. Shot through the heart. To carry on itself seems a tip of the cap to existential absurdism.

What else to do, what else would you have me do? A little mild resistance during the day. But the heart weakens, the mind fatigues, respite is earned and welcome.

So I fuck, and I smoke a little weed. I laugh with friends, go out to dinner with my wife. Enjoy movies, condemn liberal sophistic think pieces and conservative hate screeds alike. Play some video games, walk my dog. Marvel at the night sky and feel peace in the recognition that We Don’t Matter, We Never Mattered, And It will be fine when we’re gone. It. Capital “I”, if you will.

Every once in a while, I contemplate carrying on my lineage, am reminded that if anyone is getting off this melting marble it certainly won’t be an ancestor of my class and caste. I pass off that condemnation for another week, month, year, maybe forever. Can you imagine that? Willfully procreating at the end of civilization? Sometimes I can. Sometimes I can’t.

I have no words of encouragement other than we’re all down in the bottom decks of this wonderful, wicked, pointless sinking ship together. So fuck it, and fuck it together.

Fear and Loathing is getting itself a graphic novel adaptation from Top Shelf, and the mofuckah is arriving in October. I’m down for supporting anything F&L, so put me down for a purchase. Who? You. Right here. Behind the keyboard.

[This! Is! Mad Men! recaps the newest developments of Don Draper and his ragtag group of cohorts. In the spirit of the show, it will often be sexist and drunk. Apologies ahead of time.]

I’m worried about Don Draper. He’s always bent the elbow liberally, but never before has alcohol been such a destructive force in his life. Sure, there’ve been plenty of drunks in Mad Men — Freddy Rumsen and Duck Philips spring to mind — but Don’s supposed to be the exception to the rule!

Isn’t he?

When we first learnt of Don’s exploits in season one, there was a certain charm to them. He drinks? He philanders? He steals identities? All right…That’s not too cool but I guess I can see where he’s coming from. He was sympathetic – coming from nothing, he sought solace in the pursuit of the American dream. And just like Gatsby and Willy Loman and Hunter S. Thompson, Don Draper found out the hard way that the dream is dead.

How do know that that Don Draper has hit rock bottom? He gave away his secret identity.